historic lands. For when Odoacer and his Turklings and other
confederates went up into Rugiland, the country north of Vienna, and
destroyed the Rugians, and Fava their king, then the Lombards went
down into the waste land of the Rugians, because it was fertile, and
abode there certain years.

Then they moved on again, we know not why, and dwelt in the open
plains, which are called feld. One says 'Moravia;' but that they had
surely left behind. Rather it is the western plain of Hungary about
Comorn. Be that as it may, they quarrelled there with the Heruli.
Eutropius says that they paid the Herules tribute for the land, and
offered to pay more, if the Herules would not attack them. Paul
tells a wild saga, or story, of the Lombard king's daughter insulting
a Herule prince, because he was short of stature: he answered by
some counter-insult; and she, furious, had him stabbed from behind
through a window as he sat with his back to it. Then war came. The
Herules, old and practised warriors, trained in the Roman armies,
despised the wild Lombards, and disdained to use armour against them,
fighting with no clothes save girdles. Rodulf their king, too
certain of victory, sat playing at tables, and sent a man up a tree
to see how the fight went, telling him that he would cut his head off
if he said that the Herules fled; and then, touched by some secret
anxiety as to the end, spoke the fatal words himself; and a madness
from God came on the Herules; and when they came to a field of flax,
they took the blue flowers for water, and spread out their arms to
swim through, and were all slaughtered defencelessly.

Then they fought with the Suevi; and their kings' daughters married
with the kings of the Franks; and then ruled Aldwin (a name which Dr.
Latham identifies with our English Eadwin, or Edwin, 'the noble